Hossein Mousavian – Iran Lobby

Finger Pointing Mounts Inside Chaotic Iran Regime

August 17, 2018 by admin

One of the key signs of a government in distress is when the backstabbing, finger-pointing and accusations become public even as leaders struggle to maintain a façade of normalcy.

For the Iranian regime, things are not looking so hot.

The regime’s top mullah, Ali Khamenei, is the latest to weigh in against the decision to negotiate the nuclear agreement with the U.S. and other world countries. An odd position to take since he gave his own blessing to the effort at the start of Hassan Rouhani’s new administration on the carefully honed public image that he would usher in a new era of moderation from Iran.

But the regime’s leader, who rarely admits any mistakes from his divine perch, made comments this week that were posted on the Twitter account of Khat-e Hezbollah newspaper, a publication affiliated with his official website, Reuters reported.

With the issue of the nuclear negotiations, I made a mistake in permitting our foreign minister to speak with them. It was a loss for us,” Khamenei said referring to the U.S.

Khamenei confirmed this week that he has banned any future discussions with the U.S.

“I ban holding any talks with America,” Khamenei said. “America never remains loyal to its promises in talks…just gives empty words.”

The tacit criticism of negotiating the deal, which President Donald Trump pulled out of and levied new economic sanctions that potentially will cripple the Iranian economy, drives a stake into the idea that Rouhani’s administration has been a success for the regime.

Instead of the promised moderate era the Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council touted, Rouhani has overseen Iran’s involvement in wars in Syria and Yemen, a major crackdown on political dissenters, a massive escalation in the use of the death penalty and a slumping economy due to rampant corruption and graft within his government.

The new sanctions targeted Iranian purchases of U.S. dollars, metals trading, coal, industrial software and its auto sector, though the toughest measures targeting oil exports do not take effect for four more months; all areas more focused on the industrial sectors controlled by the regime through shell companies and state ownership of heavy industries.

Rouhani himself was doing the best he could to backpedal from what is now becoming his greatest foreign policy failure in the nuclear deal.

“America itself took actions which destroyed the conditions for negotiation,” Rouhani also said, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA). “There were conditions for negotiation and we were negotiating. They destroyed the bridge themselves,” he said. “If you’re telling the truth then come now and build the bridge again.”

Khamenei’s criticism of the nuclear deal essentially throws Rouhani under the bus in an effort to distance himself from the crippled economy and the massive protests sweeping the country giving rise to ironic chants of “Death to Khamenei.”

But the finger pointing is not likely to save Khamenei and the mullahs as the economy continues on a steep death spiral as evidenced by shocking economic news as Iran’s Minister of Industry, Mines and Business says, fluctuations in the local forex market in the past four months have tripled the number of applications for import licenses worth $250 billion dollar.

Describing the figure as “unbelievable”, Mohammad Shariatmadari has insisted that a “number of” profiteering individuals are trying to “fish in troubled waters”, referring to the current currency and economic crisis.

The figure of $250 billion is almost triple of Iran’s annual oil income according to Radio Farda.

Import applications mean requests by importers to receive cheaper, subsidized dollars or other hard currencies from the government.

Rouhani’s new forex policy, fixing the dollar’s official rate at 42,000 rials, encouraged scores of individuals and companies to apply for import licenses, receiving millions of subsidized dollars, bringing in goods into the country and sell them on the basis of dollar’s value in the non-governmental forex market, i.e. one dollar against more than 100,000 rials, thereby reaping a tidy profit.

An example of this profiteering comes in the telecommunications market, an industry controlled by the regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, in which certain companies received foreign currency at the official subsidized rate of 42,000 rials to a single U.S. dollar to import cellphones and then turn around and sold them at the black-market rate of 100,000 rials to the dollar.

It’s another example of the rampant corruption fostered by the mullahs and is enraging ordinary Iranians.

Khamenei recognizes that anger among the Iranian people is reaching a critical point and poses one of the most significant threats to the mullahs’ rule in the history of the Islamic state, which is why he is casting about for scapegoats to divert attention from himself, be it blaming President Trump or Rouhani, the end game is to keep himself alive and in power.

“More than the sanctions, economic mismanagement (by the government) is putting pressure on ordinary Iranians… I do not call it betrayal but a huge mistake in management,” state TV quoted Khamenei as saying as he tacitly accused Rouhani of doing little to curb mismanagement of the economy.

The corruption and mismanagement by the ruling mullahs is so pervasive and unavoidable that even reliable Iran lobby cheerleaders such as Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a Princeton University “researcher” and former Iranian regime official even jumped on the bandwagon of criticisms.

In an interview in Tehran Times, Mousavian took aim at the regime’s dysfunctional management of the economy:

“The Iranian economy is under many, many difficulties like corruption, like dysfunctionality, like smuggling, like inflation and they have a lot of problems. This has been problem since 1979 when Saddam invaded Iran, Iran had eight years of war, and after war, the U.S. pushed for many, many sanctions against Iran. However, I believe at least 50 percent of the Iranian domestic economic problem is not because of the sanctions. They are because of the domestic dysfunctionality of different system, but this is the government or other system,” he said.

“Therefore, if Iran is going to resist the sanctions, they would need to address the dysfunctionalities of their own system. Therefore, this is one reality about dysfunctionality of Iranian domestic economic system,” he added.

With friends like these, it’s no wonder the mullahs are in full blame game mode.

Iran Lobby Desperation Shoots Skyward

May 3, 2018 by admin

Hossein Mousavian- Former Iranian regime nuclear official and present lobby for the regime.

You can almost smell the desperation coming from the Iran lobby as it scrambles for an all-hands-on-deck effort to save the Iran nuclear deal before President Trump decides whether to withdraw from it by May 12.

One of the dedicated warriors for the Iran lobby is Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian regime nuclear official who wrapped himself in the cloak of academia at Princeton University as a faculty member.

In an editorial published by Reuters, Mousavian takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who earlier this week blistered Iran over its failure to disclose its nuclear program; calling the regime a liar.

Mousavian diligently checks off the talking points the Iran lobby has been flogging lately; namely that it was no secret what Netanyahu revealed, Iran has been in compliance under the nuclear agreement, and that President Trump and his foreign policy team were leading the U.S. to war with Iran.

He goes further by implying that the Trump administration’s “get tough” approach to Iran will not work.

“Implicit in Trump’s approach is that he can bully and pressure Iran into meeting his demands. However, the track record of U.S.-Iran relations since the 1979 Iranian revolution leaves little room to believe that Iran concedes to pressure,” Mousavian writes.

“I know from firsthand experience that Tehran responds to pressure by doing everything it can to produce leverage for itself. The modus operandi of Iranian leaders when it comes to addressing pressure is to become inflexible, steadfast and retaliatory,” he adds.

Mousavian finally reveals the first bit of truth. The mullahs are inflexible, steadfast and retaliatory, but that is not how they respond to pressure, it is their normal course of doing business.

For all of the cries of moderation by the Iran lobby during the negotiations for the deal in 2014-15, the reality has been a regime that have never wavered from its overriding goal of spreading its form of Islamic extremism at all costs around the world and build a Shiite sphere of influence protecting it from its many enemies.

To that end, the regime has admirably stubbornly held true to that goal by leveling Syria, overthrowing the government in Yemen, begging Russia to join the Syrian conflict and controlling Iraq through Iranian-backed Shiite militias.

Which is why Netanyahu’s central claim was never challenged by Mousavian and the rest of the Iran lobby: Iran has never deviated from its long-term plan to have nuclear weapons to use as leverage and a threat to its enemies and rivals.

But where Mousavian and the rest of the Iran lobby get it wrong is in saying that these moves by the Trump administration will push Iran into full-blown nuclear build mode.

The regime is already committed to such a path! Adhering to the deal doesn’t push them off their course. In fact, the appeasement policies practiced by the Obama administration have only made things worse. We have a track record of the past three years to show us exactly what the mullahs will do.

What brought Iran to the bargaining table in the first place back in 2015? Mousavian and his allies would have us believe it was diplomacy.

It wasn’t.

It was backbreaking economic sanctions imposed first by President George W. Bush and increased by President Obama, coupled with blocking Iran from accessing international currency exchanges which put Iran in the deep freeze money-wise.

Add to that the fracking boom in the U.S. driving the global price of oil down fast robbing the Iranian treasury of billions in cash from illicit oil sales and you begin to see how the decision to come to the bargaining table wasn’t driven by some desire for political moderation, but knee-capping sanctions that threatened the very existence of the theocratic state.

“If Trump withdraws from the JCPOA, he should not do so thinking Iran is vulnerable and in dire straits,” Mousavian said.

It is plainly apparent to even a closet regime cheerleader like Mousavian the Trump administration doesn’t view Iran on the brink of disaster. Far from it. It views the Iranian regime as robust, growing and a menacing threat to the entire Middle East.

The reason it is that way is because the nuclear deal held no restrictions on all other facts of the regime’s actions; allowing it to grow into the single biggest threat to global stability today.

The last-ditch nature of Mousavian’s missive is plain in his characterization of the protests rocking the mullahs’ control last year as “far smaller than made out to be” and pro-government demonstrations as “massive.”

The only thing true about that statement is that those government demonstrations were a massive failure and a sign of the desperate nature of the mullahs’ predicament.

It’s laughable that Mousavian ends his tirade by saying the end state for the Trump administration’s is war. The only war that is going to result from a withdrawal from the nuclear deal is an economic war as crippling sanctions are put back into place.

Mousavian says if the president wants “bigger deals” with Iran, he should build trust by implementing the nuclear agreement. The reverse is even more true.

If the mullahs want to avoid an economic meltdown that tosses them out of Tehran, they should build trust by burning their nuclear plans, dismantling their ballistic missiles and getting out of Syrian, Iraq and Yemen.

Michael Tomlinson

Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

February 14, 2018 by admin

Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former official with the Iranian regime who transplanted to Princeton University and remade himself into a scholar, has been busy advocating for his old bosses; the mullahs in Tehran.

Even though he presided over various aspects of the regime’s security apparatus and was responsible for essentially hiding its clandestine nuclear program, he has worked diligently from his university perch to push the same old narratives supporting the Iranian regime.

One of his most recent key messages has been to push the narrative surrounding the growing confrontations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In an essay he wrote for the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Mousavian dives deeply into the discussion and tries to frame Saudi Arabia’s opposition to growing Iranian influence as part of a larger U.S. security plan to maintain control in the region.

“The chief rivalry in the region—between Saudi Arabia and Iran—is in fact a proxy for the competition between states seeking multipolarity (Iran) and those seeking to bandwagon off continued U.S. regional and global hegemony (Saudi Arabia),” he writes.

“Given Iran’s expanding regional influence, the foremost concern of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and some other regional Arab states is that as the United States disengages from the Middle East and Persian Gulf, the subsequent vacuum is not filled by Iran and Iran’s allied powers. This worry is amplified by the fact that the Arab World is in decline and traditional Arab powers have either collapsed or are stricken with domestic crises,” Mousavian adds.

He tries to make the same stale argument similarly made by other Iran lobby supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council that Iran is merely filling in the natural power vacuum resulting from waning American influence and that Iran is on the ascendancy, so it should naturally take a more preeminent position.

Couple this with a decaying and decadent Arab world, it makes sense for Iran to be a natural power in the Middle East according to Mousavian.

Unfortunately, the reality is much different than the picture he tries to paint. Far from being a rising power that used its economic clout, political influence of even cultural impact to influence the region, the Iranian regime has instead used its Revolutionary Guards and Quds Force to militarily intervene in neighbors such as Syria, Iraq and Yemen, while it has funded and directed proxies such as terror groups like Hezbollah and Houthi rebels to topple government and carry out attacks.

Far from using the financial windfall it gained from the nuclear deal to better and improve its own economy and lift the poorest Iranians, the mullahs instead opted to divert billions on a crash program to build and deploy an intercontinental ballistic missile capability that has threatened its neighbors with the prospect of weapons of mass destruction raining down on them.

These are not the acts of a nation interested in being a friendly partner, but rather a brutal regime intent on subverting and controlling its neighbors in order to create an extremist Islamic version of the old Warsaw Pact to protect itself.

Mousavian also touts Iran’s willingness to fight terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but neglects to mention that through its own terrorist network through Hezbollah, Iran conducts terrorist operations far from the battlegrounds of the Middle East and specifically targets and kills U.S. personnel; most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Appallingly, Mousavian takes Saudi Arabia to task for the conflict in Yemen, blaming it for causing a humanitarian crisis there. He attempts to draw on historical claims of Houthi governance there and that the Saudis had engineered an overthrow.

What he again fails to point out is that the war in Yemen didn’t start until Iran armed Houthi rebels, supplying them with guns, mortars, rockets and communications equipment and regularly supplies them through clandestine Iranian fishing vessels; some of which have been intercepted by U.S. and Saudi navy ships.

Mousavian goes on to make similar claims that Saudi Arabia is responsible for instability in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and even Palestine and Israel. For Mousavian, Saudi Arabia seems to be the most powerfully destabilizing force in the Middle East. About the only thing he doesn’t seem to blame Saudi Arabia and its primary patron, the U.S., for is global warming.

Lastly, Mousavian takes aim at Iranian resistance groups, including the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which he claims conducts terrorist acts on Iranian soil, but also neglects to mention the long history of open warfare by the Iranian regime against its members and other Iranian dissidents; including assassinations carried out by its Quds Forces and attacks on unarmed refugees at camps in Iraq.

“These realities have compelled Iran to have an active, preemptive, and deterrent role in the region in order to secure it borders, centralized governance, and national cohesion. To achieve these aims, Iran’s foreign policy goals have been centered on confronting threats, stabilizing the region, and improving its self-sufficiency in the production of weapons of deterrence, including ballistic missiles,” Mousavian claims.

But ultimately Iranian regime has done little to stabilize the Middle East. In fact, since the nuclear deal, it has in fact been the chief antagonist and leading participant in the wars that have raged there. Even as of this month, the Iranian regime escalated conflicts in Syria when its forces approached a U.S. base along the Syria-Iraq border which resulted in attacks by U.S. aircraft.

If any nation is interested in establishing permanent military bases far from its borders, it is the Iranian regime and the rapid pace of confrontations with the U.S., Saudi Arabia and others only underscore the regime’s willingness to up the ante in terms of spreading conflict.

The real enemy isn’t Saudi Arabia as Mousavian claims, but rather the mullahs in Tehran and the Iran lobbyist that cover for them.

Michael Tomlinson